My blue suede shoes
I recently learnt about a shop back home that custom makes footwear for women and this news brought about a great deal of flutter in my heart. The big deal, you ask?
Well, for as far back as the memory goes, I have struggled to find footwear my size. While life has been very generous in its blessings of the vertical kind, somewhere along the way this lemon was thrown in. So I have gone from pillar to post, city to country, looking for cardboard boxes to bring back home but return empty-handed. When girlfriends plan exciting shopping trips, I go along graciously and try everything knowing fully well that I will walk out with a lingering smell of leather at best. When the husband asks why I still haven’t worn that pair he got me five years ago, I put it on and show him how my toes are pushed out, sitting pretty on the floor in front and watch him sigh. And so the saga continues. Except now, with this newfound custom making benevolence there finally seems to be some hope.
I think.
If I am fully honest though, there have been times when the shoe was nearly perfect but I still rejected it. Loose, tight, loud, plain, wrong colour, wrong heel — the reasons I gave were plenty. In my head, the perfect one always had to be everything or nothing at all for me.
Where or how this started I don’t know. Could it be a millennial thing? Isn’t that what we say for most things we know are wrong but can’t explain? How different it is from those tight shoes I would watch my parents patiently put on everyday without complaints. And one day it started to look like the shoes had belonged on their feet all along. It did not happen overnight but they kept those shoes for years, getting them fixed by the cobbler when they broke and generally knocking sense into them whenever needed. I grew up seeing them around forever, and grew to love them as a result.
On this trip home, I see them hard at work even now tirelessly mending, fixing, shaping and re-shaping till the shoes fit the way they like. There is no made-to-order perfection that they crave for, unlike me. I, on the other hand, can’t wait to visit that shop and see for myself if perfection can really be bought off the shelf. How exciting it is to imagine all that empty space in my shoe closet finally filled. All those outfits I love will now have matching things on my feet for company. And I would have shown life how to convert a lemon into a football and score a goal with it too. But I also feel a bit nervous. Would it make me happier?
Not sure if I want that answer but somewhere inside I secretly hope my fluttering heart and that open goalpost can wait. Maybe it is just as well if I don’t find what I want. I may even end up with what I need. Something that is a bit loose, or maybe a bit tight, a pair that almost seems right, that by slipping with a little here, and stumbling a bit there I can eventually learn to make my own?
